NEW YORK STATE HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING PROGRAM

About THE NYS HPC Program
The High Performance Computing (HPC) Program is a multi-faceted program that ties the use of high performance computing time along with the computational expertise. It is the Division's goal that by seamlessly integrating our best tools with our best researchers, New York will provide valuable assistance to researchers and product developers. The technologies of today no longer confine a researcher to a geographic region. Information flows freely and openly tying together people and their ideas like never before allowing all parts of New York to participate in the innovation economy.

This is an incredible opportunity for researchers and product developers to work together to create innovative products and solutions to gain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

NYSTAR has taken this challenge and has developed this comprehensive program to begin to build the foundation for a virtual collaborative environment. Using new technology and proven social networking tools we hope to work towards a lofty goal of having the cyber-infrastructure create a valuable platform for research. This program will be built slowly with intent to move the tools into the background and allow the many different domains to come together and focus their energies on solving the fundamental problems facing industry and society.

Check back frequently as this section will evolve as the program evolves.

NEW YORK STATE’S HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

New York State is in a leadership position in both computational resources and talent in the areas of simulation based engineering and High Performance Computing. NYSTAR has recognized that to truly leverage these resources and unleash the innovative and creative talent located throughout New York we needed to create a program that will encourage Investigators to work in a seamless collaborative environment. The problems of today are more complex than ever before and routinely cross scientific domains. For this reason this program focuses on multi-disciplinary approaches to problems which need to be handled in new and innovative ways.

Computer simulation (courtesy of Srdan Simunovic) of a Ford  Explorer crashing against a rigid barrier.

About CCNI
The CCNI operates heterogeneous supercomputing systems consisting of massively parallel supercomputers and clusters. There is a robust software environment for the development of new applications and a production environment of design tools. The facility is connected to the rest of the world through a fiber network infrastructure.

Facility
The main facility for the CCNI is located in the Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush, N.Y. This location is a short drive to the Rensselaer campus in Troy, N.Y., as well as the state capitol in Albany, N.Y. and train and air transportation.

The facility includes 10,000 square feet of machine room space with power, cooling, and backup to support this unique capability. This facility also has offices that are used on a rotational basis for partner activities.

Systems
The heterogeneous supercomputing systems includes massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, clusters built using IBM Power processors, and clusters built using AMD Opteron processors. These systems provide more than 70 TeraFLOPS of computing power. Hundreds of terabytes of storage complement this computing power.

Network
The CCNI connects to the Rensselaer Troy campus and the NYSERNet optical research infrastructure, enabling gigabit/second (or “GiGE”) connections to the Internet and Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), and most of the research networks in the world through the peering point at 32 Avenue of the Americas. Connections at 10 GiGE via dedicated waves also are possible.
 

About NYCSS
The New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS) is a joint venture of Stony Brook University (SBU) and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The Center was formed in 2007 to foster high performance massively parallel computing on the whole range of science and technology topics. Its hardware consists of an 18 rack IBM Blue Gene/L and a 2 rack Blue Gene/P supercomputer owned by SBU and located at BNL. New York State, with the leadership of the NYS Assembly, provided funds for the machine, and NYS and U.S. DOE funds supported renovation of laboratory space to house it. The machine is named NewYorkBlue. The Blue Gene/L is ranked 17th in the June 2008 Top 500 supercomputing rankings and the Blue Gene/P is ranked 75th. (link here).

NYCCS has the goals of advancing scientific discovery in areas related to the missions of the partner institutions, and also in areas related to the broader scientific agenda and economic development of New York State. NYCCS began operations at about the same time a comparable machine located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in their Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations began operations. Together these machines give New York more computing power available for general research than any state in the nation. A consortium of universities and laboratories in the State, each with strong programs in computational and computer sciences, has banded together to build a supporting infrastructure so that the state will benefit fully from the investments in these new supercomputers.

The NYCCS NewYorkBlue facility began operations on July 15, 2007. In the interim organization structure, the interim co-directors of NYCCS are Yacov Shamash, Vice President of Economic Development and Dean, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SBU, and Patrick Looney, Assistant Laboratory Director for Policy and Strategic Planning, BNL. . The co-associate directors are Drs. James Davenport, Senior Scientist at BNL, and James Glimm, Professor and Chair of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at SBU. An advisory committee of distinguished computational scientists from around the country has been formed to advise on operations. The inaugural meeting of this committee was held on July 9, 2007.
Applications for time on NY Blue are invited. There is an allocations committee, advisory to the co-directors, to recommend priorities for machine use.

The NYCCS has two supporting entities, the Stony Brook Center for Computational Science (SBCCS) and the Brookhaven Computational Science Center (CSC) . Both of these centers have a core group of faculty and scientists who work to apply or to develop high performance computing for science. The two centers are cooperative and supportive and have a mission to support and expand the community of users of high performance computing for science discovery and technology development.
 

NYSTAR HPC allocation Policies CCNI (RPI) USE POLICY NYCSS (SUNY STONY BROOK /BNL) USE POLICY Access Form Steps to getting access to New York State’s Allocation on CCNI or NYCSS: Please read the HPC Use policies (Whitepapers) to see if you qualify. If you have any further questions please contact Michael Ridley at 518-292-5700 or NYSTARSupport@esd.ny.gov.  Our average turnaround is 2 or less business days. Fill out the below application in its entirety. NYSTAR will contact you on your approval status. CCNI or NYCSS will contact you with the appropriate logins for use. This takes approximately 1 week. HPCP Application form (fillable PDF)

Contact Information
For more information, contact the NYSTAR staff via NYSTARSupport@esd.ny.gov or call us at (518) 292-5700.